Category: HOW TO

How to Organize Photos Sorted by Date based on EXIF date

Shotwell

I keep all my unorganized photos in external HDD storages just by move them from camera or smartphone. Howerver, all of them aren’t aligned with the filenames. My camera photos start at NHC_xxx prefix but the photos that taken by my phone camera starts at IMG_xxx. It’s hard to reviewing and choosing the best photo to backup / print with the same category or date. Because the categories of photos have same date in almost case. As we known, when you take a picture with your digital camera or smartphone, a time stamp is embedded in the file. Other cool types of info are also embedded too, but that’s not in the scope of what I’m covering here.
So, Organize Photos Sorted by Date based on EXIF date is the best solution to solving my issue. After researching over the internet, I found some solution to help me sort them or put them into a folder by the creating date of the EXIF data of each image.
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[Quick Tips] How to fix Mouse Disappears after unlock issue

The Mouse Disappears after unlock problem is not common error and I’ve just faced it when using light-locker / lightdm combined with XFCE4. Each time my screen goes blank after idle time is reached and I relogin, the mouse pointer becomes invisible but active. You can still move the mouse and you can see (because it highlights the window) as you move it around and you can click and right click but the cursor is not displayed on the screen. If I restarting the Xserver, everything backs to normal, but I lost my working session.
After researching on the Internet about this problem, I find the cause of this problem is light-locker package. I’ve tried to remove light-locker and boot my system with gdm and xscreensaver packages installed. It’s working flawlessly without disappeared of mouse after relogin.
This has been a known issue for some time with light-locker and xorg-x11-server. You can read more about it at #815135, #80, #94677… There are bug reports all over the place but no solution yet, e.g. In my exprienced, it’s depended on your system hardwares (Intel graphics) and linux distros (using XFCE4 as Desktop Environment). It’s fixed on my laptop after light-locker upgraded to newest version but my home station is not yet. This is often observed in systems that lock the session and return to the greeter (including at least Xubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, and elementary OS).
Here are some methods that will help you solving it.

Permanent Method

Switch to another lock screen and windows manager packages instead light-locker or upgrade / downgrade it until this problem fixed.

Temporary Method

$ xset dpms force off

Quick press any button to active and light on your screen, you will find your mouse pointer restored again.
Another way will help you restoring the mouse pointer by switching to another virtual screen TTY for example Ctrl + Alt + F1 then back to the Ctrl + Alt + F7
Another hard way is switch your mouse cursor theme will restore the pointer again.
Notes: Don’t use lightdm build-in lock screen utility by dm-tool switch-to-greeter or dm-tool lock command, because the lock screen can be circumvented by switching to console.

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Quick Tips – Disable Laptop Camera (WebCam) in Linux

By default, the modern laptop has built-in camera (webcam) but it’s seem useless because we’ve more better methods and devices to replace it. So, why do you keep it running on your machine. This quick tips will going to show you how to turn off (disable) your laptop’s camera to save the power and increase the battery usage time.
It’s very simple with few command lines.
The thing to do is add blacklist uvcvideo to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file. Here is the command:

# echo "blacklist uvcvideo" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

If the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf is not exist, you must create it first:

$ sudo touch /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Using kernel command line

You can also blacklist modules from the common bootloader like GRUB, Syslinux… Simply add modprobe.blacklist=uvcvideo to your bootloader’s kernel line.

If you are blacklisting more than one module, note that they are separated by commas only. Spaces or anything else might presumably break the syntax.

Restart your computer to apply the changes.

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pacaur/cower not finding libalpm.so

I’ve upgraded Pacman to 4.2 then I can’t upgrade the packages which I have been installed from AUR. The Terminal tell me that:

cower: error while loading shared libraries: libalpm.so.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Is the problem is missing libalpm.so.8?
I’m trying to locate it with the command:

$ locate libalpm.so.8
/usr/lib/libalpm.so.8
/usr/lib/libalpm.so.8.0.2

It’s existed, then we need rebuilt cower to help it detect libalpm.so.8. But I can’t install any packages from AUR, the way to done is manual download PKGBUILD then makepkg.

Someones has the error: ERROR: One or more PGP signatures could not be verified!. To solve it, add the missing PGP signatures into your Pacman Keyring:

$ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys F56C0C53
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How to fix XFCE4 Black & White Wallpaper

XFCE4 Wallpaper display in Black and White

After I switched some wallpapers manager apps I got the problem: XFCE4 Wallpaper only display in black and white. I have managed to fix the issue partially, by removing and reinstalling gdk-pixbuf and gdk-pixbuf2 – which I recall threw some errors during the system update. However, all custom (jpeg or png) wallpaper images are displayed in black and white once they are set as wallpaper.
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